“Zombie” Apocalypse in the West?

French politics has no analogue to the alt-right milieu that fueled Donald Trump’s campaign in the US. But supporters of French presidential candidate François Fillon share many Trump voters' rejection of multicultural identity politics, sense of marginalization, and dismissal of "elites" and expertise.

CAMBRIDGE – François Fillon, a discreet and loyal former prime minister under former President Nicolas Sarkozy, is now the right-wing Republicans’ official nominee for the French presidential election this spring. In the party’s primary last November, early polling had predicted a win for Alain Juppé, a prime minister under Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, and had put Fillon a distant third behind Sarkozy himself (who was seeking to stage a political comeback). When Fillon pulled out a surprise victory, many observers began to compare him to Donald Trump.

Fillon is a soft-spoken, reserved, and deeply devout Roman Catholic who lives in a small castle in his native province of Sarthe. He exhibits none of the brashness, vulgarity, and self-adoration currently emanating from Trump Tower in New York. But Fillon’s supporters have three things in common with Trump’s: rejection of liberal identity politics; opposition to “expertise” as a decisive component of politics and policymaking; and anxiety about loss of power and status in a country they once dominated.

Fillon’s success can be traced back to 2013, when thousands of demonstrators nationwide took to the streets to protest against a law legalizing same-sex marriage – “Marriage for all” – which President François Hollande’s justice minister, Christiane Taubira, had introduced in the National Assembly. The “Manif pour tous” (“March for all”) was the first time in many years that French Catholics had come together specifically as Catholics to demonstrate against the government.

If the French vote for Fillon, they will still be stuck in the Euro and they will again be going nowhere for the next five years.
Fillon wants to be the next Margaret Thatcher so he will get busy privatising everything and wrecking French industry. Good luck with that.

Because it is hard to admit one's own failings, there is a strong emotional appeal to blaming cultural changes, rather than one's own lack of education or marketable skills, for one's lack of economic success and/or a perceived loss of one's stature in society. In addition, for those who are religious there is a strong emotional appeal to blaming some or all of the ills that a country is facing on cultural changes that are inconsistent with one's religion.

In the US, I think Donald Trump realized (even if only on a subconscious level) that emotional appeal and capitalized on it, while Clinton and the Democratic Party in general either ignored that emotional appeal or denigrated those who reacted emotionally to what they perceived as the loss of their culture and their place in society.

Based on this article, I think it appears that Fillon also recognizes that emotional reaction and is willing to use it to his advantage in the upcoming election,. Because I think more people act based on their emotions rather than on logical thought, it appears to me that Fillon is poised to become the next President of France.

Legitimizing President Putin because he is a defender of Christendom seems somewhat medieval, but better than legitimizing him because one wants to build a hotel in Moscow, or because one imagines that he once looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul.

It may very well be that as France goes this year, so goes the future of the idea of "The West." So perhaps a turn to the medieval is in fact in tune with the zeitgeist.

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